An ARMY OF DARKNESS/
CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS Short Story
By J. Calvin Smith
PROLOGUE ONE:
EARTH, 2070
Captain Black gazed with a face devoid of
passion at the colossal wreck before him.
The castle remains stood or, rather, slouched on a level, barren plain,
surrounded by gloomy gray mountains.
The portion of Captain Black that was still Captain Black had no
knowledge of the name of the town or area where this ruin stood; Mysteron
orders had sent him there via many twisty roads, and he had gone without
question. Mysteron orders, after all,
must be carried out.
There had been a fierce battle here, the Mysterons had informed him,
many centuries before. The forces of
good had defeated the forces of evil, an army from beyond the grave, or so
legend had it. Rival clans had united
to fight a common foe, and commanding them was an unbelievable man, a man from
the future, a loudmouthed braggart who somehow had possessed the key to
defeating the evil that the two rival armies, now united, had faced. When these fallen castle walls had stood so
long ago, Captain Black thought, they must have witnessed a fearsome battle
indeed.
But the Mysterons also told him that
something might have gone wrong, something that would allow the forces of evil
on Mars to unite with these ancient forces of evil dead on Earth. The mighty man from the future was rumored
to have transported himself back to his own time once the battle was won. He had done this by speaking an incantation
found in the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, the legendary Book of the Dead. In returning to his own time after defeating
the skeletal hordes, the stranger should have rendered the Necronomicon
powerless, breaking the hold of the demonic realm.
However, the Mysterons also informed him
that this stranger also had a short memory, and had experienced trouble with
the incantation. In fact, the battle
with the evil dead started because the stranger had forgotten the correct words
to speak when he retrieved the Necronomicon from its graveyard home and brought
it here, to this castle.
If that was so, if a mistake had been
made, then the Necronomicon had power still.
The dead, the destroyed could come alive again. The book, bound with human flesh and inked
with human blood, could unite with the Mysteron's knowledge and power over
those they destroy, and produce such might and knowledge that the Mysterons
felt sure they would come much closer to their goal of crushing, utterly
destroying, the people of Earth.
Captain Black could almost taste the Mysterons' appetite for this power
and this victory with his own tongue.
The humans would indeed pay for their chosen imbecile's technical
difficulties.
"Spread out. We must search the entire castle. Do not waste time on rubble you cannot move,
but be thorough," he said to the two Mysteron clones beside him. The former man and woman had been tourists
exploring the castle with curiosity and naive glee. They had been in the Mysteron's way. Their son, who had been exploring with them, ran off in a panic
typical of twelve-year-old boys witnessing the cold-blooded shooting of their
parents by a darkly-dressed stranger.
Captain Black paid the boy no mind; the youngster had no possible knowledge
of who the dark man was or what he represented. Still, Black suspected that he had better hurry.
As the man and woman began their separate
searches for the Necronomicon, Captain Black gazed at the portion of the castle
still mostly intact: the parapet. He
then entered it through a rotted door whose fragile pieces he fiercely kicked
inward, and climbed a winding staircase.
Halfway up, he entered a small room with
a dusty table which bore two terribly tarnished candlesticks. There were several ancient instruments of
alchemy and sorcery in this room, both on and around the table. There were also, strangely, some curious
items from only the previous century: various automobile parts, shotgun shell
casings, a small beaded chain with the rotted remains of what was once probably
a key fob. A worm-eaten pile of paper
bound together in the middle of the table almost made him groan in despair at
an unsuccessful mission, but then he moved the shredded remains aside and
looked at the object that was revealed beneath.
Human skin, shaped like a bookcover with
a human face, was closed around several dozen perfectly-preserved pages. It was the Necronomicon. Captain Black reached for the book...
...and withdrew his hand quickly as a
bullet ricocheted off the table.
Looking up, he saw a yellow-uniformed Spectrum officer standing in the
doorway, gun raised.
"Step away from the table, Captain
Black!"
What?
How had they been alerted? That
boy, he must have had a camera, must have taken a picture of Black to the
authorities. Spectrum, he knew, was
wired into every police photographic laboratory there was. And those new portable digital cameras were
owned by every sightseer in the world.
There was nothing for it but to jump out
the room's window. Since the room was
not very far up the parapet, Captain Black leaped, landed and rolled to absorb
the impact, managing to draw his own gun at the same time. He was able to get a shot off at a Spectrum
officer standing only several yards away.
The bullet clipped the officer, who had been facing away from the
parapet, in the back of the neck.
Captain Black noted with satisfaction
that the officer was the famed Captain Scarlet, as Scarlet fell like a sack of
flour. Severed spinal cord, most
probably, Black thought as he ran away from the castle and into a dense copse
of trees, hurriedly and silently communicating to the Mysterons to get him out
of there.
By the time Captains Blue and Magenta
reached the copse, Black was long gone.
PROLOGUE TWO: THE PRESENT
My
name is Ash.
Man.
I can't believe I saved the world and got fired, all in the same
week. I guess what they all say is
true. Life's a bitch and then you lose
your job.
It all happened after I led the armies of
Lord Arthur and Duke Henry to victory against the army of the dead, who had
been led by an evil zombie clone of myself.
I returned home to my own time, the twentieth century, by saying the
incantation found in the Necronomicon and drinking a potion. Well, I didn't say every last syllable of
the incantation. I didn't drink all the
potion either. But you'd think that
after killing all those horrible skeletons and saving two, count 'em, two
noblemen, that someone just might give a guy a break! Besides, the stuff tasted horrible. I wasn't about to chug-a-lug crap like that.
Anyway, I get back to my own time, and I
start back at my job in Housewares at S-Mart.
I'm doing my usual bang-up job, smiling, being helpful, saying the
slogan, you know, "Shop smart...shop S-Mart," like a good little
employee. I'm also informing my less
imaginative co-workers of my adventures in the distant past. I must say, one babe there was very
impressed. She said my stories were
kind of cute. Hmf. Cute.
I saved the freakin' world, I figure.
I coulda been king. But she
liked to hear about that, and I would have been proud to tell her.
But we were interrupted.
Some shopper gets possessed because these
evil dead creepoids figure they'll hold a grudge against me for not saying
every teensy word just exactly right.
This blonde-haired, crag-faced she-bitch starts screaming threats right
there by the checkout counter. Her face
looked like ten miles of bad road. She
cold-cocked me into the sporting goods section and then ripped a cash register
right off its foundation and tried to kill the cute chick with it.
That got me mad. Real mad.
I broke into the gun case in sporting goods, pulled out a twelve-gauge,
made sure it was loaded, and then proceeded to teach this member of the Ladies
from Hades that not just love comes from the barrel of a gun.
I fired a shot that knocked the cash
register from Witchie-Poo's grasp. It
got her attention.
"Lady, I'm going to have to ask you
to leave the store."
"Who the Hell are you?" sneered
hag-face.
"Name's Ash. Housewares."
"I'll have your soul!"
"Come get some."
Then, it was basically a contest between
demonic hatred and superior firepower.
I'll bet you can guess who won.
But soon it was all done; the smoke was clearing, the girl was kissing
me in gratitude, and the satanic shrew lay atop a twenty-five pound bag of pine
bark mulch, S-Mart special this week only.
Then my boss walked up behind me.
"You just shot a customer," he
said blandly, eyes wide.
I looked at him, then looked at the
body. "She was evil. She was going to kill us. She had to be destroyed."
"You just shot a customer. With one of our guns."
I gaped at him, not believing that he
couldn't understand the situation.
"She...she had a cash register.
Just ripped it right up. She was
going to make mincemeat out of, er, uh, what's your name?"
"Cheryl," answered the cute
girl, also staring at me slackjawed, pushing away slowly from my embrace.
"That little old lady couldn't have
picked up that register," said my boss.
"You shot a customer. With
one of our guns. And then you
fraternized with your fellow employees."
"I...uh...I..."
"You're fired. But wait right here, mister. I'm calling the police."
"I...uh...hey, wait a minute!"
The police were there within
minutes. They handcuffed me and removed
me from the store. I tried to explain
to them that there was a dead woman in the store who had to be dismembered
before she could try to come back to life again. You try telling the cops that sometime. As they pushed me into the back seat, the younger of the two
officers stared at my handcuffed wrists.
The left one was real human skin.
But my entire right forearm was steel, a mechanical hand I had made for
myself in Lord Arthur's castle.
"What are you?" the young officer asked.
"Just a guy with a job to do,"
I told him. "Now could you let me
out of here so I can make sure that lady doesn't..."
Several screams and an inhuman cackle
came from inside the department store.
The two officers seat-belted and locked me inside the car. The older officer placed the shotgun, which
he idiotically insisted on calling the murder weapon, on the front seat, and
then ran inside with his companion. I
could tell from their cries of alarm that they were not ready for what they
saw.
"If you'll just let me out of these
handcuffs and this car, I'll show you how to deal with that monster!" I
yelled after them as crashes and more screams emanated from the building. "She's an evil I know about; she
followed me back from the past because I misspoke the words--"
Then I paused. Not just because they couldn't possibly hear me. But I knew the words! It was as simple as that. I twisted around to reach my left pants
pocket with my real hand, and pulled a flask out of the pocket. That flask contained the remainder of the
potion that was to send me back to my time and end the scourge of the Deadites
once and for all. Perhaps it could
still work. Because now, I remembered
the words!
I put the flask between my knees, pulled
the stopper out, then lifted the liquid to my lips with some difficulty. I drank the whole container, then spoke the
incantation exactly as it had been taught to me:
"Klaatu
Varata Nikto!"
I expected right then that the screaming,
crashing and cackling would cease. But
I couldn't tell.
I had no idea what was happening inside
S-Mart because of the weird whirlwind that had begun to surround the police car
from the time I pronounced the words. I
pressed my head against the car window to see a horrid vortex opening up in the
skies above me.
"Oh, no, not again!" I screamed
as the vortex sucked the car up into the sky.
"You sons of bitches won't even give me a break for getting the
words right!"
PART ONE:
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN MEETS THE CHOSEN ONE
When the vortex disappeared, the car hit
the ground and the door burst open. I
tumbled out, rolled a few times and felt the handcuffs' chain snap from the
impact of my metal arm on the ground.
The pain across my whole body would not subside sufficiently at first to
let me open my eyes, but I rolled over on my back. I heard voices.
"No sign of Captain Black. What happened here?"
"This vehicle just fell out of the
sky. There was a flash, and I saw it
pop right out of the clear blue and land here."
"Captain Magenta, that's
impossible."
"I tell you, Captain Blue, I saw
it."
I was finally able to open my own
eyes. Two men stood beside the wrecked
police car looking over me with some concern and alarm. They wore strange costumes of different
colors, but each had some sort of hat with a little rainbow emblem on it. One was dressed in purple, the other in
blue. I figured their names went with their
costumes.
I could see two others as my eyes focused
more clearly. One man in a yellow
uniform stood in a window of an old building nearby. Another man in a red uniform lay not far from the wrecked
car. He was apparently dead. Blood was streaming from the back of his
neck, a gunshot wound making the exposed skin match the uniform.
"I saw it too, Captain Blue,"
said the man in the window.
"We don't have time to figure this
out," the man I presumed was Captain Blue said to him. "We've got to get Captain Scarlet back
to Cloudbase. Did you figure out what
Captain Black was looking for, Captain Ochre?"
Captain Ochre. Captain Scarlet. Captain
Magenta! Whatever happened to calling
colors yellow, red, and purple, for God's sake?
"There's a very old book in here," said Captain
Ochre. "Captain Black was reaching
for it when I found him. It looks like
a grotesque human face, and it has a lot of strange writing and pictures that
look like they were drawn--"
"In blood," I rasped.
"Get down here with that book,"
said Captain Blue, staring at me in fear, though I personally felt I had no
strength to harm him in any way.
"Whatever the Mysterons are looking for, I think this man and that
book both have something to do with it."
Minutes later, I was finally able to
stand. I was herded by the uniformed
men, who called themselves Spectrum officers, into a small passenger jet, along
with the dead man in the red uniform, whom Captains Ochre and Magenta bore on a
stretcher. Captain Ochre had given the
Necronomicon to Captain Magenta, who was apparently a linguistic expert of some
kind and wanted to have a look at the strange writings. Captain Ochre piloted the jet and we took
off for the place they called Cloudbase, whatever that was.
"I've got about a million questions
for you guys," I told them as we sat down in various seats in the
plane. The body of Captain Scarlet lay
on the stretcher in the back. Captain
Blue was removing the handcuffs from my wrist with a bolt-cutter, and Captain
Magenta was across the aisle from us, looking intently at the pages of the
Necronomicon.
"Well, that's good, because we have
about as many questions for you," replied Captain Blue, removing the
destroyed handcuffs from my wrists.
"What year is this?" I asked.
"2070," said Captain Blue. "You don't know the year?"
"Well, this isn't exactly my
time. I spent most of my life in the
late twentieth century, but I recently took a tour of the Middle Ages."
"What?"
"I got sucked back there just like I
got sucked here into the future."
Captain Blue shook his head. "How do you know about that book?"
he asked, gesturing toward Captain Magenta.
"That's the Necronomicon Ex
Mortis. The Book of the Dead. It contains incantations, funeral rituals,
human sacrifice instructions...lotsa nice stuff for reading when PENTHOUSE
starts getting you bored," I said.
"He's right," said Captain
Magenta. Then he started moving his
lips in strange ways, trying to pronounce some of the words on the page at
which he was looking.
"Don't do that, idiot! That's what got me into trouble in the first
place!" I shouted at Captain Magenta.
He clammed up and glared at me, cross but thankful. "I heard a tape of some doctor who had
found the book. He read words from it,
and the next thing I knew, my girlfriend was..."
"Dead?" asked Captain Blue.
"Possessed," I said. "I had to dismember her to keep her
from attacking me. Before long, the
evil got into my own body. That's how I
lost my hand." I held up the metal
hand to show them. "I cut it off
with a chainsaw."
"What a ruthless and bloodthirsty
man you are!" exclaimed Captain Ochre in the cockpit. "Captain Blue, we should not have taken
him with us."
"No, no, I got rid of the evil
inside me!" I tried to explain.
"The book was in the professor's cabin, where my girlfriend and I
were staying. There was a passage in the
book that freed me of the evil influence, only it sucked me back into the
middle ages...just like I came here. I
had to save the armies of Lord Arthur and Duke Henry before I could go back to
my own time."
"The ancient castle of Lord Arthur
was where we found you and the book," said Captain Blue. "The Mysterons want the book; they sent
their agent, Captain Black, to get it."
"Did you say that those who become
possessed have to be dismembered?" asked Captain Magenta.
"Yes," I replied. "Or else they come back."
"Retrometabolism," said Captain Blue. "Or something very like it."
"Retro...Mysterons...what's going on
here? Who are these Mysterons?"
"Invaders from Mars; invaders
without form, Mr.--" Captain Blue
stopped.
"Name's Ash," I told him.
"Mr. Ash, the Mysterons were
inadvertently attacked by Captain Black on Mars two years ago; they possessed
him and vowed revenge on us. Spectrum
has been defending the world against them ever since. They, like the evil you have fought, know how to bring the dead
back to life. But they do it by
cloning."
Just then, I heard a muffled groan. It was coming from Captain Scarlet's body!
"Shoot him!" I screamed,
standing up. "He's been possessed
by the evil!" I tried to reach for
Captain Blue's gun, but he struck me in the chest, knocking me back down into
my seat. I could only cough.
"Captain Scarlet is not
possessed. He has...remarkable
recuperative powers."
"Coulda fooled me," I gasped,
as I watched the red-uniformed Spectrum agent sit up stiffly on his stretcher,
rubbing the back of a neck that was amazingly free of any sign that there had
been a bullet wound. "That's not
remarkable, that's historic!"
"We cannot tell you the
circumstances behind Captain Scarlet's regenerative powers; that is a state
secret," said Captain Blue.
"But know this: He is on
our side."
"Who..." said Captain Scarlet,
slowly opening his eyes and staring at me.
"Who are you?"
"His name's Ash," said Captain
Magenta. "According to this book,
he is the chosen one, gifted with the ability to break evil's hold on the human
domain."
"He's from the twentieth
century," said Captain Blue, getting up and walking back to Scarlet. I could tell from the exchanged glances that
the two were close friends.
"How're you feeling?"
"I've been better. I'm lucky it was only a single bullet
wound."
"Well, Dr. Fawn's going to be upset
that he can't do tests on your recovery."
"I hate to disappoint him."
"He'll get over it. Besides, we need you in top condition to
help us deal with recent developments."
"Yes, such as Captain Black. He shot me."
"Right after you went down, we lost
Captain Black, and then a twentieth-century police car came out of the sky and
crashed onto the ground, disgorging this man as its only passenger."
"Good Lord! What about the two Mysteron agents the boy
spoke of?"
"The boy who took that picture of
Captain Black?"
"Yes. I was trying to find his Mysteronized parents who were searching
the ruins, but who ran off when we landed."
I spoke up, "If they're still down
there, and the book's up here, they won't be fooled for long. If they know about the Necronomicon--"
"Perhaps they can zero in somehow on
the energy it still possesses," completed Captain Scarlet. "It would become a homing device,
leading them to us and Cloudbase."
"You have been in contact with the
book?" Captain Blue asked me.
"Yeah. I retrieved it for Lord Arthur's sorceror before they had the big
party in the courtyard. You know, the
party with skeletons and dead people and swords. Dead man's party. And the
book was in the cabin of the professor's where I took my girlfriend before
that. Well, actually," I
continued, scratching my head, "it was sort of after that, time-wise. I mean--"
"I understand what you mean, I
think," interrupted Captain Blue.
"They might have sent Captain Black
to Lord Arthur's castle simply on a hunch that the book would still be
there," suggested Captain Scarlet.
I added, "Of course, now that I'm
here, they might be able to trace the book anyway."
The three men who weren't flying the
plane nodded worriedly.
I pointed to Captain Magenta. "All the more reason for you to figure
out how to get me home. I'll take the
book with me; just help me get out of here."
Captain Magenta sighed, "There's a
great deal in here about the Chosen One, and it's all cryptic. It will take some time. The thing about sending you home is that
each of the ways you used before cannot be used again, according to the
writings I've read so far."
"Figures," I growled bitterly.
"We have left two Spectrum agents on
the ground to continue searching for the two Mysteron agents," Captain
Blue told Captain Scarlet. "But
Ash is right; they will be able to trace that book to us through him."
"Unfortunately," sighed Captain
Scarlet, "we do have to brief the Colonel. He will have to approve whatever decision we make."
"Coming up on Cloudbase," said
Captain Ochre.
I was quite startled because I had not
felt us descend in preparation for landing.
Imagine my surprise when I looked out the window and saw in front of us,
growing steadily, an aircraft carrier that seemed to be tens of thousands of
feet above the Earth's surface. The jet
we were in landed on what appeared to be the deck of this place called
Cloudbase with a fighter escort.
"How does this place stay in the
air?" I asked Captain Scarlet.
Blue gave him a cautioning look before he
could open his mouth.
Scarlet merely nodded and said, "I
can't tell you that. Besides, it's
almost a whole century more advanced than anything you know of."
"O.K.," I said, grinning a grin
that belied my nervousness. "Just
keep 'er in the sky long enough to get me home."
After we landed on the flying runway, we
disembarked via a special elevator chamber that dropped the plane down into
some kind of hanger in one of the lower levels of the base. From there we took enough turns and stood on
enough moving walkways and escalators to make me about as lost and dizzy as I've
ever been. But within minutes, we were
all seated about the control console of Colonel White, the head of this
organization called Spectrum, or at least the head of Cloudbase. The old man was sharp as a tack. He listened intently as his men described
the situation to him: how I got there, who I was, what Black was looking
for. He asked few questions but seemed
to be able to find out exactly what he needed to know. He seemed to be a born leader. S-Mart could have used him as manager
instead of Jerk-Face. I probably
wouldn't have been fired, if that were the case.
"Have you been able to obtain more
information from your study of the book?" he finally asked Captain
Magenta.
"Yes, there is a passage that speaks
of a second battle that the Chosen One must fight," said Captain
Magenta. "He would be in league
with angels and other heavenly beings, but would return to Earth and banish an
evil from the skies."
"But that is pure mythology,"
stated Colonel White, frowning, "just the sort of fantasy I would expect
from an old book."
"Not necessarily," said Captain
Scarlet. "Perhaps it is an
allegory."
I scratched my head. "I thought it was a human face on the
cover; it doesn't look any crocodile I've ever seen."
"AlleGORY, not alligator,"
Scarlet explained impatiently.
"Suppose the angels meant our Angels."
"Baseball team?" I asked.
"Fighter pilots," he sighed.
I smiled at the memory of my brief
glimpse of the beautiful female navigators, then tried to figure out what he
meant about an allegory. Oh, well,
reptiles or no, I saw basically what he was getting at. "Yeah, that could be what the book
means. And the heavenly beings are you
guys," I suggested.
"And the evil from the skies means
the Mysterons," concluded Captain Magenta, opening the book to the page he
had found.
"So I gotta help you guys, if I want
to get home," I said. "What
else does it say about what I have to do?"
Magenta read some more silently, then
said, "'The Chosen One must cast the source of evil into the bowels of the
Earth."
"Source of evil? Certainly Captain Black!" pronounced
Colonel White.
"Maybe not, Colonel," said
Captain Blue worriedly. He turned to
face Magenta. "What else does it
say about the source of evil?"
"Nothing. The passage ends abruptly, as if cut off," said Captain
Magenta, equally worriedly.
"This whole freakin' thing started
with the damn book," I suggested.
"Maybe that's the source of evil.
I remember the army of the dead hungered for it."
"But the bowels of the Earth?"
asked Captain Scarlet.
The room fell silent as we all
thought. Then, it struck me. "The pit!"
They all turned to face me. Blue, I could tell, still didn't look too
sure I had both oars in the water. "Pit?"
he said.
"Pit, Captain Azure," I said
smugly.
"Blue," he said with a warning
tone in his voice.
"How did you get off without a fancy
color for your name? Promotion?" I
asked. He sniffed, so I continued my
explanation. "There's a pit in the
courtyard of Lord Arthur's castle. It
was an execution and torture pit in which some of the evil dead dwelt, waiting
for victims."
Ochre shook his head. "We found no such pit on the castle
grounds."
"Well, they kept it sealed with a mechanical
hatch. It was pretty advanced, I
thought, for a medieval society."
"There was a boarded-up space with
an ancient crank by it," said Captain Magenta, nodding slowly. "Perhaps the pit is underneath, and it
was sealed up because of the old legends."
"But what if the source of evil is
Captain Black?" asked Colonel White insistently.
"Then he has to go in the pit along
with the book," I explained patiently.
God, these people were slow.
"And the Mysteronized tourists? What if they send more agents?" asked
Blue.
"Pit, pit, pit," I said. "We lure them all, unless I can destroy
them beforehand."
"You?" asked Captain Scarlet.
"I'm the one who has to get rid of
the book," I told him as I stood up.
"I'm the Chosen. I'm the
one they want."
"You're an arrogant braggart,"
mumbled Captain Ochre under his breath.
"I heard that," I snapped.
"We cannot give you a weapon,"
said Colonel White.
"I know. But I've got this," I said, holding up my metallic hand and
flexing the fingers. "I can crush
rocks with this hand."
"But it won't kill Mysterons,"
said Captain Scarlet. "Not for
good."
I sighed and smiled. "There's also the shotgun in the front
seat of the police car."
"No good," said Captain Blue. "Again, it would only be
temporary."
I frowned. "What kills them?"
"Electricity," said Blue.
I thought a while. Then the idea came and I smiled. "Where's your mechanical shop?"
"Soldering gun," I said, and
the gray-uniformed officer handed me the 21st Century equivalent.
The wiring was tricky, especially around
the elbow.
"Power source?" I asked.
Captain Blue handed me a two-pound gray
slab with platinum contacts on top.
"It's the most portable we've got."
I tightened the screws at my wrist where
the wires joined, then at my belt holster where the battery sat.
One of the Angels came by the open door
as I was re-working the hinges on the little door on the back of the metal
hand. I looked up and winked at
her. She went off in a huff.
"That should do it," said the
gray-suited officer, making sure my belt was secure, then turning on the power
switch next to the battery.
I held up the hand. My whole body was humming in resonance with
the power source. Sparks jumped from
finger to finger. "Groovy," I
said, and fingered the switch, turning the electrical field off again.
"Get that damned thing away from
me," said Captain Scarlet, wide-eyed.
"Let's roll," I told the
assembled officers.
"You all have your jobs," said
Colonel White, standing at the door.
"Find those agents. Use the
Mysteron rifle if you must. And wait
for Captain Black to try again for the book."
"S.I.G.," said the officers.
"P.D.Q.," I added.
"Oh, button it," mumbled
Captain Blue.